Thursday, February 28, 2013

Vivienne Michel is your typical
French-Canadian-girl-who-was-orphaned-and-therefore-sent-to-England-to-become-a-lady-but-ended-up-losing-her-virginity-and-worked-in-a-newspaper-office-where-she-had-another-love-affair-before-that-ended-in-an-abortion-and-so-she-returned-to-Canada-and-decided-to-go-on-a-road-trip-via-her-Vespa-which-she-bought-in-England-all-the-way-to-Florida. There, I just saved you from reading Part I of this book. By 'this book', I mean Ian Fleming’s The Spy Who
Loved Me, and it’s supposed to be a James Bond adventure. So where is Bond?
Who is Vivienne? And who are the nasty characters who are holding her hostage
at the Dreamy Pines Motor Court, a motel in the Adirondacks?

The Spy Who Loved Me
is a bit of an interruption in the “Blofeld trilogy” of novels where Bond
chases after Ernst Stavro Blofeld and his organisation SPECTRE. Blofeld never
appears in this novel, but reference is made to SPECTRE and that is why Bond
eventually comes onstage. He stumbles across the Dreamy Pines Motor Court by
accident, and finds there Vivienne Michel being held hostage by two
nasty-looking gunmen. A fight ensues, St. Patrick drives the metaphorical
snakes out of the motel, and claims his prize.

Tuesday, February 26, 2013

M summons James Bond into his office and delivers a stern
lecture. It seems that Bond’s last physical exam was a disappointing one – not surprising
when the man drinks excessively and smokes up to sixty cigarettes a day. So M
decides that Bond has got to look after his health more. And he sends him off
to the Shrublands health clinic to regain his strength, get off the alcohol and
cigarettes, and get back on the track to good health!

But while there, Bond comes across the mysterious Count
Lippe, a man with a secret to hide. It turns out he is a member of the Red Lightning
Tong, which operates in Macau. Soon after he makes the discovery, an attempt is
made on Bond’s life by tampering with a spinal traction machine. Luckily, Bond
survives the attack and retaliates against the Count. Unknown to Bond, this
childish game of revenge delays a major conspiracy, Plan Omega, that is about
to rock the Western world…

Sunday, February 24, 2013

Today I will be reviewing the James Bond collection For Your Eyes Only story-by-story. This
is one of only two short story collections involving James Bond, and this one
contains only five stories. It’ll probably be best if I discuss my impression
of the collection as a whole after I’ve reviewed the individual stories. So
without further ado, let’s get started.

From a View to a Kill

This is far from Fleming’s most inspired story. It’s
actually a pretty boring way to open the collection. James Bond investigates
the murder of a secret service motorcycle rider. He was going on his usual
route from SHAPE (Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers Europe) to his base when
he was attacked and his secret documents were stolen. Bond doesn’t have much trouble
finding the assassin, and you wouldn’t exaggerate much by calling the story a
celebration of predictability. It’s just not all that creative nor interesting,
especially when you consider that Bond’s previous adventure was the wild romp Goldfinger.

Friday, February 22, 2013

We all, of course, know about the death of Julius Caesar.
According to Shakespeare, the doomed dictator was warned by a soothsayer to “beware
the Ides of March”. But Caesar did not heed this warning, and on that day he
was stabbed 23 times by a group of conspirators led by Marcus Junius Brutus (Et tu, Brute?). Sic semper tyrannis and
all that rot.

At least that’s what the historians think, and let’s leave
them to worry about facts and historical accuracy. Instead, let us contemplate
what really happened on that fateful
March in 44 B. C.. Have you heard, by any chance, of Manlius Scribo, the star
reporter for the Evening Tiber—an early
success in journalism, edited by Q. Bulbous Apex? Perhaps you have heard of the
barbaric British slave who served Scribo: Smithicus? But more important than
that, do you know that the events leading to Caesar’s death were all started by
the murder of the actor J. Romulus Comma? No? Then, my boy, you must run along
to your nearest bookstore and acquaint yourself with Wallace Irwin’s The Julius Caesar Murder Case.

Wednesday, February 20, 2013

Goldfinger said, ‘Mr
Bond, they have a saying in Chicago: “Once is happenstance, twice is
coincidence, the third time it’s enemy action.”’

Goldfinger opens
with an unexpected reference to Casino
Royale, the first James Bond adventure. It starts with Bond running into a
man he met during the events at Royale-les-Eaux: Junius Du Pont was one of the
men at the card table on the night when Bond memorably cleaned out Le Chiffre’s
funds. Now, seeing Bond at the airport by coincidence, Du Pont leaps at the
chance to make conversation. And before long, he makes Bond a job offer.

It turns out that Du Pont has been losing heavily at cards
with a man named Auric Goldfinger. This man Goldfinger is incredibly rich; he’s
simply rolling in money. He’s one of the richest men in the world. Yet he
consistently beats Du Pont in canasta, and Du Pont is a pretty good card
player. He’s convinced that Goldfinger must be cheating somehow, but he can’t
figure out how. And so he hires Bond
to investigate. And thus, with the simple affair of a man cheating at cards,
James Bond is launched into his wildest adventure in Ian Fleming’s Goldfinger.

Sunday, February 17, 2013

It’s interesting to look back on the story behind Ian
Fleming’s sixth Bond adventure, Dr. No.
After taking a major risk in From Russia
With Love, Fleming decided to play things a bit safer in the follow-up. Many
of the plot elements were taken from a proposed TV show, Commander Jamaica, where the main character was supposed to be named
James Gunn, and his great enemy would be the half-German half-Chinese Dr. No.
The project never came to fruition and so Fleming incorporated several of these
ideas into Dr. No. And I must admit
here that Dr. No is not my favourite
James Bond novel. But it sure comes close.

It begins quite simply, with a murder. Commander John Strangways
and his secretary are both gunned down one day, right before they are to make
an urgent call to London. Strangways represents the Secret Service in Jamaica,
you see, and he had an impeccable record with his calls. He had a habit of
playing bridge with a few other men, and would leave the game every day at the
same time to make the standard call to London. “It was an iron routine. Strangways was a man of iron routine.
Unfortunately, strict patterns of behaviour can be deadly if they are read by
an enemy.”

Tuesday, February 12, 2013

I haven’t really tackled Polish mystery novels all that
often on this blog. I wrote something about them as a guest post for Beneath the Stains of Time— which was
still known as Detection by Moonlight
at the time. And last year I read a book by “Joe Alex”, a Polish author named
Maciej Słomczyński who was the only person to have translated all of
Shakespeare’s works. I hope that this year I’ll be able to cross the language
barrier a bit more often and give readers a small taste of the stuff that is
currently being written in Polish… and hey, we might even get a novel that
slips through the cracks and gets translated into English.

What are the odds of that
happening, you might ask? Well, the odds are better than you might imagine,
because I’ve found one. Zygmunt Miłoszewski is an award-winning Polish author,
author of one of the few Polish crime novels to cross the language barrier into
English. The novel is Uwikłanie,
translated as Entanglement and published
by the Bitter Lemon Press in 2010.

The setting is modern-day Poland and our hero is Teodor
Szacki, a public prosecutor in the nation’s capital, Warsaw. He’s about 35 or
thereabouts, and he’s married and has a daughter. He’s also got a tough job, one
that can get depressing as hell. Take this latest case, for instance. A body
was found in a Catholic convent, rented as a retreat centre. At the time, it
was being used by a psychotherapist for a weekend of group therapy sessions,
where each session revolved around a different person. The point of each
session was for the participants to role-play as important people in X’s life,
and X would have to come to terms with [insert your favourite psychological
issue here]. One pseudo-scientific explanation later, we find out that a child’s
heart disease can be caused by his father’s failure to attend his parents’
funeral. Sounds like a fun time!

Saturday, February 09, 2013

The Agatha Awards noms have been announced, and looking over the
nominations list, I am overcome with a wave of emotion. That emotion is sheer
apathy. I just don’t care about any
of these nominations. I read plenty of new books in 2012, and I enjoyed myself
for the most part. But come awards season, it seems to be a celebration of the
bestseller lists and of the underappreciated art of mediocrity.

But don’t worry, I’m just being a jackass today, and after I
finish writing this piece I’ll go to a corner, sulk and cry myself to sleep, all
while pondering on my various psychological issues, caused by my mother not
hugging me enough when I was a child. At least, that’s the only explanation I
can come up with. I should be excited! It’s award season! We’re celebrating the
cream of the crop— the very best that the mystery field had to offer in 2012! I
should turn that frown upside down, grab a martini (shaken, not stirred) and
talk about how brilliant all these novels were.

Well, no. I refuse. I’m reminded of a scene in Douglas
Adams’ The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the
Galaxy. Our heroes were subjected to the third-worst poetry in the universe,
and are asked by the poet, a heartless Vogon, what they thought of it. And they
babble on about how the rhythmic devices counterpointed the surrealism of the
metaphors and nonsense like that. I’ve taken English classes before, and I have
written essays praising some unreadable crap as masterful literature. You can
do that with anything. There’s just no honesty in it.

Thursday, February 07, 2013

SMERSH, the top-Secret Russian Murder Bureau, is furious. It
has been involved in failure after failure, and the results have been
disastrous for their reputation. So they have decided to strike back. Their
target? The English Secret Service. They want to create a major scandal, one
that will cause the public to go into an uproar and permanently stain the
service’s reputation. And they have one particular target in mind. He’s an
agent who has given SMERSH plenty of trouble in the past. And his name? James
Bond.

SMERSH appoints Colonel Rosa Klebb as head of this
operation. And the plan is a complex one, a brilliant piece of work designed by
the world-class chess grandmaster Kronsteen. For this plan, Klebb needs a few
elements. One of them is a mad killer named Red Grant, a vicious, amoral
psychopath whose homicidal urges coincide with the full moon. But there’s also a
role for a beautiful woman in this plan, and Corporal Tatiana Romanova is
recruited for that part. And this forms the basis for the plot of Ian Fleming’s
From Russia With Love.

Monday, February 04, 2013

Charlie Gowen isn’t a monster by instinct. He’s a sensitive
and caring person. He doesn’t want to
hurt people. And he loves children.
He doesn’t want to hurt them. He wants to protect them from harm. Take Jessie,
for instance. She’s taken a few nasty spills on the playground and her hands
are all bruised up. Charlie sees this, and he follows Jessie and her friend
Mary Martha home, intending to warn Jessie’s parents to take good care of her.

Only he doesn’t follow the girls to Jessie’s house, he
follows them to Mary Martha’s. And he doesn’t warn anyone, he keeps the
knowledge of the address to himself. You see, Charlie isn’t entirely normal. I
mean, the doctors said it was okay for him to go out into the world, but he has
been warned to keep away from children. His brother Ben is supposed to take
care of him, make sure nothing else happens like it did that one time. You see,
Charlie is a pedophile.

Friday, February 01, 2013

Diamonds are being smuggled into the United States of
America, and millions of dollars are being lost every year as a result of these
criminal activities. The British Secret Service has finally got an idea of how
the job is being done: they’ve intercepted a member of the gang who was
supposed to help ferry an illegal load of diamonds from London to New York. But
they haven’t let on that they know anything about this transaction: instead,
they’re sending one of their top men in his place. His name’s Bond. James Bond.

Bond’s mission is simple in theory: find out how the diamond
pipeline works and then report back. Bond is rather bored with the assignment.
He has a low opinion of American gangsters, thinking they’re nothing but a
bunch of Italian men stuffing themselves every evening and then knocking off a
liquor store on the weekend to finance the next week. But as he finds out,
those are the only gangsters who are ever noticed: there are gangsters behind
these gangsters and more gangsters behind those.
The landscape of criminal life in America is far more complex—and
dangerous—than Bond could have ever dreamed…